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jsuda writes "The preeminent general reference source for Mac OS X has always been the Missing
Manual Series written by David Pogue. The latest iteration in the series
is its Mac OS X Leopard Edition, completely revised, and it is the biggest,
most comprehensive, and most useful of all the editions in the series. It covers
the Mac OS X desktop and file system, the free applications included with the Mac OS
X installation, the system components and technologies, networking and online
features and components, and includes welcome appendices on installation, troubleshooting,
Windows/Mac comparisons, and a Master Keystroke list." Read on for the rest of John's review.

Mac OS X Leopard Edition: The Missing Manual

author

David Pogue

pages

893

publisher

O'Reilly Media Inc.

rating

10

reviewer

John Suda

ISBN

9780596529529

summary

Great Manual for all levels of users

Every one of the editions has been exceedingly well-designed and written combining
serious treatment of subject content with style, wit, and humor, as well as honest
evaluation and critique of features of the Mac operating system. All of the OS
X Missing Manuals have addressed issues for a broad range of users, from the lightly
experienced, the intermediate, and for power users. For the most part, however,
the primary focus of each edition has been on the less experienced users. This
has changed with the Leopard edition.

There seems to have been a deliberate effort to make the book more appealing and
useful to upper-end users without losing any utility at all for others. There
seems to be more material for power users- -there are more Power Users
Guides providing advanced information and techniques, more UNIX references
for those willing and able to take avail of the UNIX kernel underlying the operating
system, more identifications of keyboard shortcuts, and more disclosure of undocumented
and advanced features than in previous editions.

For example, Pogue itemizes and describes at least 20 UNIX utilities that only
power users would want to use, explains how to configure preferences for the Terminal
application, explains how to deal with the file and folder permissions system
using UNIX commands, and even notes the existence of the venerable Eliza
therapist emulator program hidden in a part of the emacs text editor. At each
juncture of describing operating system features, Pogue explains from the perspective
of different levels of users, including the power user, like himself. Unlike in
many other books purporting to cover a broad range of users, this one does not
short on the higher-end.

This is all well and good as casual users are still widely well-taken care of
by the thorough and well-organized explanations of nearly every feature of OS
10.5. The book is illustrated profusely with screenshots of system features, configuration
processes, comparison of the Mac OS X versions, comparisons of Mac OS X to Windows
features, and more. Nearly every page is loaded with Tips, Notes,
FAQs, lists, tables, and sidebars. Throughout, there are nuggets of insight
and technical arcana that even Mac veterans will be surprised to learn about.
I learned, for example, that the one-button Apple Mighty Mouse has a secret 2-button
feature. Also there is a similar way to operate a laptop with a two finger trackpad
technique. There are a lot of tips and tricks like that in the book. Even beyond
description and explanation, Pogue provides useful recommendations for configurations
of the Dock, recovery from common errors, and using Automator to design practical
workflows for common tasks.

The subject content builds upon that of previous editions and updates it with
material relating to the 300-plus new features of Leopard. Much of the new material
covers the Leopard update highlights the backup program called Time Machine,
a desktop switching application called Spaces, the Stacks organizing feature,
the file previewer, QuickLook, and the feature enhancements in iChat, Mail, and
especially Spotlight, the search tool.

Spotlight is much more than a mere search tool although it is a great one. A whole
chapter is devoted to it alone. Pogue explains how to use it not just for casual
and advanced searching (using over 125 types of data and metadata) but as a quick
launcher of files, folders, and applications; as a calculator; and as a dictionary.
Sophisticated query languages can be used and Pogue lists a series of power user
keyboard shortcuts for Spotlight use.

I see the book as especially useful for those Windows users of all levels gravitating
to the Mac platform. Not only is the treatment of the Mac OS done well, but at
nearly every juncture, Pogue takes the perspective of a Windows user and provides
practical comparisons and contrasts of operating systems.

Weaving all of these perspectives into a harmonious, readable manual is a fine
achievement. The content discussions and explanations are never abstract but written
from the viewpoint of the thoughtful and practical user and no one is better at
this than David Pogue who has been cited before as one of the worlds best
(technical) communicators. The denseness of the treatment of the subject content
diminishes somewhat from the readability of the book compared to prior editions
and there is a bit less wit, humor and style. That is the trade-off, I presume,
for the increased breadth and depth of the content treatment but this Missing
Manual is still as well written as a computer manual can be expected to be.

You might want to check out this link from The Unofficial Apple Weblog (http://www.tuaw.com/2008/02/25/potential-fix-for-an-annoying-macbook-air-wireless-issue/) to see if it addresses your issue. The link says it's for MacBook Airs but some users have reported success with other models.

That was SO pissing me off last night. Just out of the blue, the wireless disconnects on me, then does it again in like 2 minutes, and gain. ugh! I turned the airport card off and back on, seemed to fix it, but really, what the hell!

If by Airport you mean a wireless connection to an actual Apple Airport router, then skip this reply. If, on the other hand, the wireless router is not an Apple router, check to see if the router has some kind of "turbo" or "speed boost" or similar mode. Those modes do some things that are outside the standard but often work (especially with wireless cards made by the same manufacturer as the router!), but sometimes don't. If the router has such modes, try turning them off.

In fact, this book is available on the O'Reilly Safari Books Online (no relation to the web browser) service, and I do read them on my iPhone. Low-end subscriptions are relatively cheep, and well worth it; I keep 10 books on my bookshelf at any one time for about $20 a month. I just added this one to my bookshelf.

OK, so Apple doesn't include a manual with their software, necessitating that one buy a third-party help, and then O'Reilly issues a new one with every update of OSX. Does OSX really change that much from version to version? Wouldn't the old Mac OS X Tiger: The Missing Manual [amazon.com] continue to serve most users?

You can ignore the "10." in Mac OS X version numbers. The transition from Tiger to Leopard is from version 4 to version 5. Yes, that's a big change.

Just because Microsoft can't come out with OS updates but once or twice a decade doesn't mean that Apple isn't providing significant updates to their OS more regularly. People see a reason to spend $130 for Leopard; there must be something new there.

"Wouldn't the old Mac OS X Tiger: The Missing Manual [amazon.com] continue to serve most users?"

Not necessarily. Because Leopard is a major upgrade, the Tiger edition might be OK for the basics, but there's always going to be that 10% that will mess people up because it doesn't work that way anymore. For example, the networking, sharing, and printing UI was completely revamped. Also, many of the Spotlight capabilities mentioned in the article summary are new to Leopard. They wouldn't be covered at all in th

Users would of course find that many things from the Tiger "missing manual" would still apply. Obviously, though, anything that changed between Tiger and Leopard would be different. Why wouldn't O'Reilly want to stay up to date?

Dtrace ported from Solaris for developers, and a bunch of other dev tools and new APIs

Application layer firewall

Built in mandatory access controls/sandboxes and app signing for security

A guest account that resets itself to a clean default state each login

Does OSX really change that much from version to version?

Yes. 10.n to 10.n+1 is major upgrade akin to going from XP to Vista. As one of those people who doesn't read the manual before diving into something, I'm still finding new features and I've had it for months. Just yesterday I noticed in an e-mail a friend sent me about a concert he was going to downtown "next friday at 9:00", that right clicking on the time, gave me the option of automatically creating an event in the calendar program for that day at that time labelled with the concert name. That's exactly the kind of stuff a book about Leopard is nice for finding out about.

Trust me, if you expect "Spaces" to be like the virtual desktops you're used to in Gnome or KDE -- it isn't. It's practically useless in fact being based on the notion of application partitioning rather than task partitioning. This means if you try to spread out windows from one program over several desktops, you're in for some confusing behavior. And if you used forwarded X sessions over X11 via ssh -- get ready for really crazy behavior unless you keep all your windows on one deskt

Yeah -- Leopard needs a manual if consider how boogered up X11 was until the 10.5.2 release, and how amazingly useless Spaces is -- seriously, I had no idea that it was possible to misapply up the multiple desktop metaphor, but Leaopard has "screwed the pooch" on this front, giving us some strange mutant iteration of multiple desktops. It's litterally impossible to do X forwarding from a single terminal and then spread forwarded windows out over two or more "spaces". I'm reverting to Tiger till the 3d par

I've had my mac for a month. I had Mac-style mouse acceleration for 2 days.

Then, I installed Logitech's all-in-one OSX utility (the Logitech Control Center). It recognized my Logitech USB mouse and - voila - the awful acceleration was gone, swept aside by using the hardware vendor's driver instead of the one that ships with the OS.

Sir, my name is Stanford and I am contacting you from Apple special support. It seems like you have stopped drinking your kool-aid. If you like we can send you 10 free packets of sugar-free Jobs next day air. Continue to drink your medication, I mean, promotional drink. Continue the mantra of "Apple is never wrong, white plastic is the most beautiful thing in the universe" over and over.

Additionally you can use option+left/right arrow to jump to beginning/end of words and option+shift+left/right to highlight words... while apple/command + shift +arrows will highlight the rest of the sentence to the left or right of your current insertion point.

Due note though that some applications need "custom" fixes for that problem too. Firefox is the only one I'm aware of, but it's a big one. The really annoying part is that Firefox loses this setting EVERY time it updates. I managed to find a small little program to fix Firefox quickly, but it's still annoying to do. I eventually got over the "Red button on Windows doesn't exit the program." thing. I (mostly) have gotten over the "Green button doesn't really maximize most windows." thing. The broken Ho

^A and ^E. Handily, every text box that's a product of the standard libraries on a Mac supports (albeit not desperately, or at all, well documented) basic emacs binding. It's a NeXTStep legacy. So I'm typing this into a standard browser text box in Safari, and ^A, ^E, ^T, ^B, ^F, ^K, ^Y, ^O, ^P and ^N have their expected meanings. The meta/escape versions don't work, and there's no marks (^@ or ^-space), kill ring, and so on. But it's enough to be going on with, and makes typing slashdot posts far mor

Emacs binding is present for all Cocoa text fields (Safari, Camino, most Apple-supplied apps with the occasional exception). You have no idea how many times I sit here at work on an XP system and try to Control-T to twiddle my typos!

I can't tell you off the top of my head, since it's not something I consciously think about, but now I've typed something into this box I can see what buttons my fingers press when I think beginning / end of line...

Apparently it's command-left/right. Skipping a single word is option-left/right. Unless you are in a Qt app, in which case it might be control, because Qt developers wouldn't know interface consistency if someone beat them to death with it (not sure if this has been fixed in recent versions of

Try this [harvard.edu]. I've used it to "correct" a few oddities in the default behavior of my mac, although I probably wouldn't have bothered with it unless I had also needed it for typesetting in LaTeX.

Presumably your little comment was meant to prop-up OS X as a real OS based on its POSIX compliance.

One need only watch a Mac user work for 5 minutes to recognize that its POSIX compliance means nothing. The OS seems to miraculously turn even previously reasonable savvy computer users into specific-application-using near-luddites. Happened to my best friend. Seriously.

Stop supporting ISBN-13 numbers, damnit! It is like the IP6 of ISBN numbers:

- We can still go years with the existing ISBN-10 system.- We can gain even more years if large publishers were to return unused parts of their ISBN-10 space.- The ISBN-13 system will require vast changes to existing libraries costing billions of dollars.- In fact, BAT ("Book Address Translation") is good enough for most users.- BAT provides an extra layer of security that ISBN-13 just doesn't have.- The extra digits are inefficient and take up needless space.- None of the problems with ISBN-10 are fixed by ISBN-13.- Noone can remember ISBN-13 numbers, they are just too long.

Did I miss any?

And while I'm here anyway, just who is misplacing all those manuals anyway and why is that newsworthy?

* sometimes doesn't recognize monitors when waking from sleep. Sometimes the monitor it doesn't recognize is the macbook's own.

* Fucks up screen geometry when plugged into a 1600x1200 external monitor (menu bar moves to external monitor as needed, but stays at the native-screen width; X windows and most applications silently ignore clicks near the lower or right edges of the external monitor

I'm sorry I ever upgraded to Leopard -- it's such a buggy piece of crap that I'm beginning to feel like I'm using a Microsoft product.

I have the exact same issues with my 2.4 GHz MacBook Pro. I did an "archive and install" from 10.4, but I'm thinking of doing a clean reinstall and seeing what happens. A friend of mine with the exact same laptop upgraded to Leopard and is having no problems, so I'm guessing I have some kind of crap third-party drivers, kernel extensions, or something on my system that is screwing things up.

* occasional graphic system hangs (background processes work fine, keyboard and mouse stop working, firing up a new dialog box causes a process to hang)

I haven't seen that one, so I can't comment.

* Looooong wait times for wake-from-sleep (15 seconds typical) with no indication whether it's going to wake from sleep at all (e.g. if the battery is drained)

Heh, I wish my Windows machine was as fast waking as a broken OS X machine.:) I've seen this one occasionally when running old carbon applications that have not been recompiled since 10.1. I think it has to do with a conflict when there is a runaway LaunchCFMApp process and the system is suspended and you require a password to wake from sleep. Or maybe you're seeing a different issue. Anyway, that does not seem fixed in 10.5.2

The things I hate about Leopard are what I've experienced: I was given Leopard as a Christmas gift, installed it with baited breath on Christmas Day Eve, lost my entire hard drive's contents (well, temporarily; I was able to recover 95% when I booted into FireWire Target Disk Mode [but even then only when attached to an older G4 running Tiger], and I've done six updates with no hitches at all so I know what I am doing, but apparently Apple didn't when they created the installer. Subsequently, aprés Leo

The ratings given to reviewed books are useless as it is now. Most books are given an 8 or 9, and there doesn't seem to be any system for how to rate the books. For example, the last X books that I looked up under book reviews were given: 7/10, 9, 9/10, 6/10, 8, 8/10, 8/10, 9, 9, 9/10, 9, 8, 8/10, 7/10, 10. The reviewers don't even know if there should be a "/10" in the rating or not. I've also seen ratings on a 1 to 5 scale.

It would be better, if different parts and aspects of the books were given separate ratings, and then a total rating was calculated from the parts. Please also look into how other publications rate books. I'm sure there's a lot to be learned.

Also - it's been a long time since I bought a copy of Windows XP, but I seem to recall that the "manual" it came with was basically a "Getting Started" guide, maybe 50 pages long or so, with big, easily-readable text on small pages. I don't really see that as much of an improvement over what Apple supplies.

if it was called "Secrets of OS X" instead of "The Missing Manual" nobody would bitch. People are more than happy to take any opportunity they can to take a shot at apple. My girlfriend recently bought a vista laptop. It didn't come with a vista manual (or even install/recovery disks)... but there is no "Vista: The missing manual (and recovery disk)"

Throughout, there are nuggets of insight and technical arcana that even Mac veterans will be surprised to learn about. I learned, for example, that the one-button Apple Mighty Mouse has a secret 2-button feature. Also there is a similar way to operate a laptop with a two finger trackpad technique.

As a recent switcher to Mac, and Windows and *NIX Power User, I am interested in this book. But can someone else tell me if the various ways to simulate right-clicking is really the extent of the "insight and t

I found these one useful too: http://www.apple.com/business/videotips/ [apple.com] you can subscribe to the videocast. While most video tips are things I knew about, some are truly useful and well hidden features (oops?). The best part is probably the short length of the videotips themselves: 1 minute per week is something I can afford.

Just like all the Windows books that cover material that Microsoft didn't put in a book with the operating system? How about all those programming books, the compiler makers should cover every topic you should ever need to know about programming too.

the book doesn't tell you how to make it work when it doesn't. It is a comprehensive guide to all of the features that may be missed by users who aren't paying attention. I gave the tiger edition to my mother in law. While she could use the machine out of the box, she wouldn't figure out the more complex aspects of the finder on her own. In addition, the book contains a basic guide to the ilife programs as well as iChat. While she could likely figure this out on her own, having a resource has been great for her. It gives basic users a more advanced knowledge than they would otherwise have.

Well, that sucks. I just need to know when they put in the option to have folder at the beginning of the list in finder. That's the one thing that drives me nuts about OS X. I have my files organized into multiple, many-levels-deep folders. Why they haven't included this feature, at least as an option, is beyond me. One large sand box of files doesn't work well a lot of the time.

That's the exact same "answer" everybody else has and it does nothing to actually fix the problem. I want to sort by name, so I can find things, and I want folders at the top so I can dig through them quickly. I don't understand why they don't have it; it is a minimal amount of effort to incorporate.

There is no such feature. I can understand why it might be desired though.
You can simulate it by naming all folders starting with a character that gets sorted to the top, such as a space " " or a dash "-". Similarly if you want them at the bottom, start their names with "zz" or something similar.
But you probably already figured this out on your own....

Sadly, this is the kind of things in OS X designed to be coherent. If you order by class, things get ordered by class. If you sort by name, things get sorted (guess what!) by name. You can't have "sorte by name but also not", sorry.

You could always check out Path Finder [cocoatech.com], and use that instead of Finder. It offers this feature. I've been using it in place of Apple's Finder since 10.1 or 10.2. It offers a lot of things Finder doesn't. The only minus, if you're attached to Cover Flow, it does not have this feature yet (which is the only feature I'm aware of that Finder has and Path Finder does not). QuickLook works.

Although, you can use QuickLook from Terminal, also. Just add this to your ~/.bash_profile for added laziness:

I actually tried Pathfinder this week as I knew of it before I bought the MBP. I'm not sure if I want to pay $35 for basic OS functionality. If I find other reasons I may break down and get it. I just wish this was built in. It is in EVERY other OS I've used including every flavor of Linux and Unix I've tried.

I actually bought the book; I haven't read it yet. I was a hardcore MacOS user at work (1987, System 6 on a Mac II, through 1993, System 7.something, Mac IIfx) and at home (Mac SE, PowerMac 6100AV, iMac DV 400 MHz). I kept current through MacOS 9. I never took the leap to Mac OS X. I thought I'd lose too much hardware, the software upgrades would cost too much, the machine kept on working.I finally broke down and picked up a second-hand machine (Mac Mini G4 1.42 MHz) with MacOS X Leopard installed. It'

I'll bet RedHat hasn't totally borked the multiple desktop metaphor. Apple's Spaces does application partitioning -- not task partition. God forbid you actually try have two windows from the same application open on different desktops. And if you are using forwarded X sessions via SSH -- you might as well just give up doing any work ever... till you revert to Tiger and your trusty 3d party multiple desktop program.